Dead Flowers

by Alex Laidlaw

  My friend turns out the light.

  The truth is that I have it better than so many people, better even than most. I’ve got a little hole to fit my family in. We keep six sharp knives in the kitchen drawer.

  * * *

  What’s this noise about? My eyes caved in for listening. Ribs of the sidewalk, stutter to step. Cats into houseplants, get themselves off. I want more of this holiday—wait long for me on the coast.

  What are these five hundred brilliant places? Where are our sails cut into the wind, forging vice versas over the great grey seas? My friend wore her black pants tight tonight and her shirt cut oh so low. I couldn’t wave a hand in her silk, couldn’t conceive of such words as a poet would say.

  Forty-one hours. Forty-two days.

  And I am not responding to anything. Somehow this has become a pastime for me—to scribble such words as these in sleep, in the morning, in the middle of the day. In every stolen moment. Turn one leaf—burning. And jets will put a storm into the sky.

  I am a wreck, exhausted. I am under your spell. I’ve already hit myself off three times today, but I cannot shake the desire to be washed, to dry myself in your sheets. It’s a mental thing. Neurotic, a kind of disorder I suppose.

  * * *

  I’m in pursuit of some mystery, where maybe there’s none, but listen:

  A body turns up on the side of the road, stuffed into a bush, by the old high school. A week later we’ll have found his killer in the trash of so many wasted days. He says he thought he was his father so he cut him with a knife. He says he thought he was—not unlike the logic of a certain type of dream.

  It’s a kid who finds the body. Seventeen. Our detectives say they’ve never seen a corpse bleed out so much. Never seen a body that was once so full, now so emptied of its blood.

  The kid says, I want a drink of water.

  They give him a muffin and some cold caffeine. They give him a bench to sit or sleep on.

  In the meantime, I’ve been carrying a pile of stones inside my pocket. When the kid finds the body, he’s got a branch of yucca, held like a torch in his hands. All this raises a number of questions—wider and wilder than who, what and where.

  * * *

  Tonight, my friend is on her knees, praying, hands clasped, at the side of the bed. I’m at the desk killing flies. Rather, I am trying to kill flies, but for a while I can’t manage it. They’re too fast. I try again and again to catch them between the top of the desk and my palm. With practice, I am improving. Now I catch them under my hand and press, flattening every crevice of my palm into the desk, but every time I lift my hand, the fly flies away.

  She’s murmuring and I hear now and then supplications to the Virgin, to the Lamb and the Sky. To the intricate cosmos of the intractable soul.

  I tell her I am certain that God is on a different channel by now. He doesn’t respond to these traditional calls, I said.

  She says, God is not affected by our changing notions of his being.

  I purse my lips and nod. Is this the same girl who told me she was afraid of Jesus Christ?

  Oh, she says, Christ I cannot fathom. With Christ, I am appalled. He’s fit for bushes, nexus, wilderness and an overly protracted youth. I mean, the light, the truth and the way? Not to mention the law—give me a break.

  She says, I’ve been doing this for twenty-two years myself. So tell me, what business has Christ in mine?

  She spits and goes back to her prayer.

  I swat a fly on the desk and it lives another fifteen days.

  I ask her, Listen, have you got anything to drink? My heart doesn’t seem to be beating right.

  I broke all my bottles, she says. I got drunk and then I got mad at myself and then thought I didn’t want to keep them anymore.

  I get it, I say, and I do. But I wonder how we’re going to pass the night.

  * * *

  Broomstick broken to a cudgel, held in an elderly woman’s hand—old fat lady on the sidewalk. They are filming a series on the Avenue de Dame. Time was, nobody took pictures here. It’s a sign of progress—at least that’s what they say.

  The woman crouches and collapses over the curb into a heap. Her body gives itself to the concrete in a way you’d not expect to see a living body do—loose as flour in a ten-pound sack. It’s so convincing you would think she’d died. Her weapon sticks into a sewer, and all the other crap in the gutter, the mulch of leaves, the indistinct slop of too many rainy days, of too much exhaust paints her dress and her coat. Later, for the camera, they’ll have her tear her dress and singe the hair growing out of her face. I think to myself, Someone’s had to imagine this all, from the reek of engines to her bottle-cap knees, grinded into a curb before the open doors of the Marché aux Puces.

  Spectators have lined up to watch. From across the street, behind barricades, they can hardly contain their excitement. They ask: Who do you think is the star of the show?

  Who wrote the song I’ve been dreaming about?

  What’s the best place to hide a knife in the nude?

  What’s the best place to hide a bird?

  Someone answers, In a cup of coffee, of course.

  The director is watching it all on a screen. The writer is likely at home. It’s gotten so suddenly cold, I forget to wear a sweater when I go for a walk. I try to be quiet, to make myself small. I squeeze by the caterer’s table, careful not to upset the spread.

  My friend is an avid reader, so I’ve picked up a copy of Donne’s Biothanatos.

  * * *

  Now the man takes hold of his cock and my friend bites the tip of her tongue.

  People wonder, he says, how a man can remain sensitive through the length of his life. He laughs. I don’t know how others do, but I keep a tin of smelling salts, here in my pocket, in an old snuff box.

  She mumbles and rolls onto her side, so he goes on telling a story.

  Worse than her being unable to die, was the fact that she kept two dogs in a cage. She said she had to do it, or else when she left the house the dogs would tear into her memories. Her memories, she said, would be shredded, scattered all over the floor, but what could that mean? And what does a suicide want with her memories?

  The accumulation of so many years, she offers.

  The culmination of every awful thing that a person carries in this life: two desperate dogs locked into a box, says the man.

  He scratches his face. My friend kicks the blankets off her toes.

  In just another minute she’ll start thinking aloud: The places you go—or more like the moments you live—or more like the ones that have passed—the moments of time—as if time was a clock—if a clock was a cage—and if we could only make more clocks, and carry clocks, and hang them on our kitchen walls—if only we could wear them on our wrists—clocks on fingers, clocks on doors—then by having so many, we’d be catching time, more and more and more of it, until the day came when we’d have gotten it—gotten it all and sealed it away. Then we’d be able to live our lives without time’s abhorrent, constant convolution. We’d live one moment into the next—our lives a disconnected series of moments without the glue of time’s narration to bind them.

  They put the kettle on the stove to boil for tea.

  After tea they climb into each other. Someone gets bitten and someone gets split. One gets an elbow, the other gets slapped. I roll my eyes across the bed and look to where the blankets hang down almost to the floor. On the floor is a stack of books. The one on top is German Drama Between the Wars. I roll my eyes and consider the sounds.

  My friend turns onto her stomach and says, Pretend like I’m sleeping… She closes her eyes. If I were sleeping, what would you do?

  * * *

  I’m talking with the ghost of an old friend. She says to me, Give me a taste of your wasted thoughts.

  Okay: Where’s the best place to hide a bird? In a bowl of salt. Where’s the best place to hide a knife? In a book no one’ll read. Where’s the best place to hide a fish? In your womb, of c
ourse. If you haven’t got a womb, you find a girl, young man. Go find yourself a girl, give up everything you know for her. Give up all that made you whole and be a splintered bit of—shards of utter—bliss. Be a waste of passing days. Make a baby. Teach your baby right. Tie a pouch of smelling salts beneath his nose and tell him: Wear this for your whole long life. Should your baby be a lady, tell her: Always keep your eyes wide. Always keep your mind alert. But if your baby be a man, tell him: If you want hallucinations, sleep. If you want a transformation, dream. If you want to find a lover, sing. If you want to stay awake, my boy… To your daughters say: These salts will keep you active and give her a knife, saying: Where’s the best place to hide a weapon? In the mail. Where’s the best place to hide the truth? In the press. Where’s the best place to hide around here?

  * * *

  Now the kid is driving around with our detective on the morning after the crime. He’s narrating all of what happened before.

  It was a birthday party, so we drank. We watched a woman dance. I was drunk.

  What woman? asks the detective.

  One woman, twice as old as the kid, gorgeous in the way she skipped around and around the stage.

  Somewhere I wanted to put my teeth, says the kid, parked between her legs. Something hard to something soft. Something to drink, though I had drunken a lot.

  They drive past the post office.

  Here’s where I sat and tried to carve our initials into wet cement.

  Your own initial and those of a girl—but what girl?

  I don’t know. I remember her name, but that doesn’t mean much.

  The detective tells him, I’ll decide what means what in all of this.

  Here I crossed the street.

  And why did you cross the street?

  To run into someone.

  And here again, says the kid, because it was getting cold and I saw some flowers. I wanted to bring those flowers home and give them to someone I knew.

  To whom? the detective asks.

  She doesn’t live around here anymore.

  The kid continues, I walked the rest of the way, admiring the petals, the leaves. Here I thought I would cut across the schoolyard to gain a few minutes.

  The detective pulls up across the street from his house. You live here by yourself? he asks.

  No, says the kid, with a girl, but she’s out of town right now.

  I’ve got to come up, the detective says.

  The way he sees: the stairs, the gauze-like shredded wool of wood, the empty rooms. How he detects subtlety, an abundance of lies, though not for lack of reaching toward the truth.

  They walk into an empty room and the kids says, This is where we share our bed. We sleep together, my mine with her hers.

  Into another empty room, the kid says, This is where we watch the news.

  In the kitchen, a spoon, a piece of wood and a bowl. In the bathroom, the tap dripping into the tub. Steam across the vanity. No windows in the room.

  Where did that bunch of flowers wind up?

  I gave it away, says the kid, just like the Good Samaritan.

  * * *

  At four o’clock in the morning, I take my son out for a walk. I carry him into alleyways and side streets. We count the doors hanging open like maws devouring the dark.

  I say, One door.

  He says, One.

  I say, Two doors.

  He says, Two.

  I say, Three doors.

  He says, Four doors, and it’s startling to hear.

  There is the image of a woman trying to catch letters from the alphabet as they crop into the frame around her bed. I see how easy it would be for the letter e, say, to be as sharp as ice when she grabs it. How she would be cut and would try then to rub out the pain of her fingers into her leg, not knowing that the glass had stuck into her skin. How she would open a new wound in her thigh.

  The next time I look at my son, he’s asleep. I am on my own now, carrying a child down the sidewalk of the Avenue de Dame. It’s a portrait hanging crooked, but they’re filming another episode here: a pair of drunks stand in a doorway and sing a soldier’s lullaby while a worker cleans the sidewalk with hot water from a hose. Three men carry a wooden ladder down the street, taking breaks every so often. During their breaks, two of them kiss while the other stands with his back to the wall. They bare teeth into each other’s mouths. They rub their legs together. Meanwhile the odd man out looks at his watch.

  The truth is I don’t care about any of this—not these people, nor their suffering, nor their sex. I lower my child into his bassinette and sing him into faraway sleep. I make myself a coffee and get ready for work.

  * * *

  The man tells another story: Now he waits out the rest of the day for his girl to come home. He tries to sleep. He can’t sleep. He spills a pile of dimes from a cup onto the floor. He turns on a light. The girl comes home after midnight, and that’s it.

  That’s it? What happens? asks my friend.

  It happens. I mean, he waited too long. There was no reason to wait. No reason to shake anymore. All the worst vibrations will rub themselves out, given time. They were both so tired, they fell asleep. Maybe in the morning, they fucked. He, having dreamt of a man with tattoos on his face and the door to their apartment wouldn’t close. She dreamt of horses and of a poet with long, wavy hair. She’d had to sit with this woman for hours in a cellar, waiting for the end of a film.

  I shuffle toward the window and think I see a pigeon in the dark, but it’s a cluster of leaves, white and grey. Tell me, I ask the man myself. How does it feel to get older?

  Older than what?

  Older than me, I guess.

  My friend hums the tune of a popular song called “Give a Young Man a Fish.”

  She sings, Beware of the fish, he’ll swim into your life, and park himself high on a shelf with your books.

  Now go to sleep, give it up, sleep until morning, till the mid-afternoon. When you are sick of it and feel you can’t sleep anymore, sleep still a little while longer.

  * * *

  She brings me to a place to play piano. We’re under some building, in a padded room. We’re here for an hour or more, the door latched shut behind our backs. We make a heap of our coats in the corner.

  Her fingers, skeletal. Her arms, surreal. Her sense of how to usher in the silences, enviable in the highest degree. She tampers at the keys, non-committal. She ties strings together, each of them slack.

  I ask, Who is the girl with dusty hair, ragged legs, long legs, ragged socks, knit sweater, hood up in the rain, rain water rolling over her eyelids? Same one who curls her arm to smoke?

  I tell her, I want to carry on a dialogue with someone I’ve only just met, but she speaks a kind of gibberish.

  It’s supposed to be like piano keys, tampered in an empty room, the way one momentary hymn strikes up, collapses into another, lapses into some stutter of words, a note, a note, a cluster. Afterwards, grows into another hymn, different now, a bit of momentary still—as like the rise and fall of dunes in the desert. All the rest is just a mind that interferes. No one is asking anything when they’ve come to listen this way. The music she plays is interference. It makes them docile and content. It’s enough for them to know that life is nothing but a series of this, strung end to end, nothing but a bundle of thread that’s so loosely entwined and held, stuck together with crummy white glue. Problem is that my own composition is nothing but a stuttering of keys.

  Later, I take her to the river. We walk for hours past factories, abandoned, red-bricked, out of use. You could pick up a rock and break windows. You could screw or go down to your knees. We do neither. We do nothing. We walk past broken doors.

  She says, Do you want to go in?

  I tell her I do, but we don’t.

  * * *

  She says to the man, Eat me where my limbs collide.

  He does, and she accuses him thusly: I’m aware of what you’ll say in the morning—either that vows made in wanting
to fuck are like promises made to a mirror, or you’ll say that as lust is to love, so sleep is to death, love lasting till death, lust only till sleep, and so in the morning is gone, and with it you go… I could argue, but why should I bother? Who knows if in the morning I won’t feel the same way.

  * * *

  The kid spends his whole day in the bath. He drains a little water off and replenishes it so that the bath stays hot. He’ll spend the whole night there as well, only going out once to meet a very tall man.

  * * *

  And I am still doing as I have done. Writing, Here little bird, come take this bone and carry it with you wherever you go.

  * * *

  Then like that, from fingers outstretched, palm to the ceiling, like releasing a dove or a pigeon, the very tall man bends himself into a ball and tries to hide in a corner of the room.

  Every night I tell this story to my son before his going to bed: Once there was an old man with an apartment just north of the tracks who kept a flock of forty-four birds in his kitchen. (The detective pricks his ears, adjusts his ridiculous hat). But the birds never trusted the man. He fed them seeds which he had gathered with his own two hands and went about it with the gentleness of a man. The birds spent their lives near the ceiling—as far from the man as could be—treading in the air to keep themselves safe. Occasionally one or more would die of exhaustion, their paper-weight bodies falling to the kitchen floor. The man would sweep them up and carry them away. A funeral bath, the sashaying of a long woollen dress, black shoes, asphalt and yellow paint. (Then, all of a sudden, for having been so tall, the detective clews his body into a corner of the room. A girl dressed in mourning lies on the bed. Earlier today, she broke her favourite cup in the sink). Finally, the old man gets impatient. All he wanted was the loving respect of the birds, all he wanted was their trust. Now he feels cheated and betrayed. One day he tricks them out the window. They exit, and he closes it after them. It rains, and the birds are confused. Their wings, like leaves, drag them down in the cold.